Thank you. I would posit that IF we made our immigration and temporary visa policies MORE like Mexico's, then things would be fine. Just try to cross into Mexico illegally and you will see what I mean.

Another problem is misuse of H1B visas. Many consultants just open up companies to bring engineers from outside and then they have no projects for them. Even the people especially from India are so crazy to go and work in US they do anything to get a H1B visa. Its good US immigration laws are strict.

While I completely support the natural right of child to be with the parents whether he/she is a documented worker or not. But if US immigration laws are not strict as they are now, many people from around the world will come there and make it their home. We should not forget Government has to pay for the infrastucture,security and other social services. They can only take care of people who are citizens or have entered the country legally. Emotions are good but they cannot run the country.

Crazy? Try picking up the pieces after an someone (often an illegal immigrant) has stolen your identity and made a mess of it. The "bleeding heart" solutions are all short term, and only mildly mitigate the current pain at the cost of greater pain later on. The better, and longer term, solution is to encourage the illegal immigrants to stay in their respective countries, and send missionaries to spread the gospel of working together to the betterment of the community. Mexico, for example, is a country rich in natural resources - it could be a prosperous place if people would choose to work together to build up the necessary infrastructures, instead of going for the easy money to be illicitly gained north of the border.

Now, let me see if I can find some article a bit more in the technology realm...

Yes, but horror stories like that don't lead to a solution to the problem of uncontrolled immigration, Rick. You don't solve the problem of migrant workers by allowing more uncontrolled immigration or by guaranteeing citizenship to whoever manages to avoid getting a valid visa and then evade the border patrol.

Migrant labor is a way of getting cheaper food prices. A country should be allowed to debate whether migrant workers should be commonplace or less so, without having to automatically accept uncontrolled immigration and automatic amnesty.

What are you suggesting, for example? That migrant workers get automatic citizenship, so then we'll need another generation of migrant workers (i.e. willing to work for very low wages) because the kids of the existing migrants won't agree to those low wages anymore? Where does that stop?

I neglected to add a story I heard when visiting temporary migrant farm labor housing run by the our government south of Santa Cruz, Calif.:

Families must by law vacate the housing after the harvest and before June and must then move at least 50 miles away. This sets in stone that their kids start the school year in the US, then finish it in Mexico.

BTW they have the audacity to forbid kids from riding bikes on the property.

I think that conflating the two immigration debates raging, i.e. the H1B visa debate and the illegal immigration debate, must be a politically correct way of obfuscating the facts. It's very doubtful that there's a lot of intersection between the two sets of immigrant, and for darned sure we don't have some 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants in the high tech industry. We don't have that many employed in the high tech industry.

Nor is anyone suggesting that families should be split apart. Why that ever gets mentioned must be, again, for the sake of politically correct obfuscation of facts.

I think any sovereign nation should have the right to control immigration into its borders, looking for the mix of immigrants that their economy needs. We're way past the days where the population had a hard time just sustaining itself. I think Marco Rubio was right on target when he said, "It's a matter of national sovereignty."

I would agree that immigration reform is a huge issue in high-tech industries. Of course reasonable people are going to disagree on highly complex and sensitive issues. But a debate on this subject on the pages of EE Times is not out of bounds, in my opinion.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.